Month: May 2016

I’m going to use the topic of food to explain why what we eat is not chosen by us of a free will. Understand that none of us is the true author of the choice of what we eat.

1. We don’t choose to be hungry in the first place. We need to eat to live and we feel pain if we go too long without eating.

2. We don’t choose which foods taste better to is than others. We eat more of the things that we like better.

3. We don’t choose which foods are available in our area. We don’t control the climate and what grows nor do we choose which stores carry the food or what the prices are.

4. We also sometimes consider how healthy foods are for us and try to eat foods that will help us be stronger, live longer, lose weight, or prevent disease. However we don’t truly know what is really healthier nor do we have the power to make the healthy food available at a cheaper price or taste like our favorite food. If the food you like happens to be healthier or cheap, then you lucked out.

These 4 facts are a simple way if understanding that we have zero control over the food that we end up eating. It’s true that we try our best to weigh the options we have and consider all of the relevant factors, but these determining prior causes that our food decisions are based on is totally out of our control. You might say that you choose your food, but you don’t choose to choose your food.

Another way to think of it is to say that, if we “had a choice”, wouldn’t we all choose to never eat? If we could be solar powered machines that didn’t need to eat and yet were always full of energy, there would be no use for food. In a sense, we are all slaves to biology in this way. We don’t eat because we woke up one day and thought it would be fun to shove a grapefruit into the big hole in our face. We eat because we die if we don’t.

This is a powerful way of understanding the lack of food-free-will. This is a specific area of understanding that helps us understand the bigger picture that free will is an illusion. It applies to topics other than food too. However, the reason food is an important place to start is because we all are forced to eat. It’s something we all have in common.

I’ve been at Java programming again. I’ve organized some code into functions and have a whole new system of generating images. Particularly, I have improved my most useful function. I’ll try to include a screenshot here.

This function is the new and improved version of the original chessboard function. It is not limited to zeroes and ones. It supports multiple colors, which in this case are represented by integers. However, theoretically these numbers can be interpreted in any way you would like. For example shades of gray or an indexed palette. This function makes no assumptions about what I or anyone else might do with the array. What those colors are depends entirely on other code which sets up the colors in a palette. I have functions for that though too which are used in combination to make rainbow or grayscale colors.

But that’s not all! It now does more that squares. It has the variables box_width, box_height, and box_depth which are independent of each other. These variables are essential as they allow tell the program when to switch to a new color. For example, if you set the height higher than the width, the rectangles will appear taller than they are wide. I’ll show some example images that have been generated with this function.

So as you can see, I’ve learned a lot more about creating images using Java. However it’s very time consuming and exhausting. I think I’ll take a break for awhile but it’s so rewarding seeing the kinds of things I can make with it.